Wednesday, 26 October 2016

RECENT FILMS

THE GIFT.

This is a psychological thriller with pretty good
reviews everywhere. The director is Australian, Joel Edgerton and he does an
excellent job with thin material; it is very well put together and beautifully
edited. Briefly, it’s about an upwardly-mobile young couple recently moved to
Chicago for a new job/fresh start and the husband runs in to an old school
friend from twenty or so years ago who then follows him home, takes an
unhealthy interest in his wife, keeps leaving them gifts, keeps turning up
outside at unexpected moments and generally won’t leave them alone. It turns
out that the husband bullied this guy mercilessly at school; so, what does he
want now?

Quite a nice premise. Keeps you gripped more or less to the
end and there are some subtleties in the screenplay, like the wife wondering
what kind of monster she has married and the husband realising that he has a
job that he isn’t really qualified for and has a classy wife that is too good
for him. It isn’t a simple stalking film.

Best of all Rebecca Hall is in it: she transforms
everything she appears in.

THE MARTIAN

We missed this first time around at the beginning of the
year. Wasn’t that bothered if truth be told; I read the book ages ago and couldn’t
really see how a film might improve on the reading/imagination experience. And
it doesn’t.

Matt Damon is in it and I don’t know how much he was paid
but money can’t buy what he brings to something like this. It isn’t just great
acting: it’s an everyman character that never overwhelms the telling of the
tale. Tremendous, I think.

I am not going to slag it off. How can you slag off
something that made $650m at the box but only cost $110m to make. But I much
preferred the book.

MUD

We watched this on TV.

Mathew McConaughey is in it, as is Reece Witherspoon in a minor
role [is her career over now?]. I wasn’t fussed with it: another American film
in which all is resolved with guns.

It is a kind of modern take on Charles Dickens’ Great
Expectations with Pip and his secret liaisons with Magwich. Here Magwich is
played by McConaughey, hiding on a river island after having been chased by the
law for the murder of a man down in Texas. The Pip person is a young boy, Ellis
who brings him food and fuel for his boat and tries to reconcile him with his
long-time girlfriend, Witherspoon. That’s it really; that’s the story.
Reviewers draw comparisons with the greats of American literature: Hemingway;
Huck Finn; Peckinpah; the river and the island as a boys-own adventure ground.
Peckinpah I suppose because of the violent shoot-out at the end. All very
American; all very male.

It’s got good reviews though. Maybe I just don’t know my
American literary references well enough to make the necessary connections. And
the guns; again.